Mark created a browser extension encrypts the conversations you have online. Is that the best way to protect yourself from intrusive advertisers and tech companies? And more importantly, it that cool?
"You can have a conversation with your friends without Facebook and the monopolies trying to target you for ads or extracting information to sell to advertisers."
Listen to Mark’s submission featured in Episode 82 of How Cool Is This? and read a transcript of the full 5 minute podcast episode below:
Mark: Hey! I'm Mark Nadal, and I run an open source research company that has raised about $3 million to study privacy tools. And one of the most exciting privacy tools that we've worked on is a thing called a party.lol.
It's a browser extension that makes your conversations on Facebook, Twitter, email, anywhere, any website, even Reddit, YouTube comments... encrypted. That way, Facebook and Google cannot look at your messages, but your friends can.
It's a way of adding privacy on top of anywhere on the internet, so you can have a conversation with your friends without Facebook and the monopolies trying to target you for ads or extracting an information to sell to advertisers, to keep that private between you and your friends without you having to use some new app.
While other tools like WhatsApp are encrypted, Facebook still has access to the keys to decrypt your data, and they will still analyze the conversations you're having in order to target advertisements at you.This tool bypasses all of that.
So that's the 90 second idea for a privacy tool that gives you privacy no matter where you are on the internet: party.lol.
Leave us a voicemail @ 848-863-9917
to submit your idea to How Cool Is This?
Nick: Brian, how cool is party.lol, the browser encryption service?
Brian: Party.lol sounds extremely cool and might be a contender for next year's Coolios.
Nick: Definitely a contender for next year's Coolios.
Brian: In general, the idea of somebody thinking that they're only talking to somebody else, and then there's another party that is observing that conversation, is uncool.
Nick: I feel like I'm not one of those people that's overly concerned with my security online, the privacy of my data. I guess I just don't really care what other people find out about me. And, honestly, I don't mind targeted ads.
Brian: It isn't like people are sitting there going through everybody's conversations and saying, ‘Aha! This person is going to buy some soda!’ But there's a level of trust and security that I want as a default that isn't there. And I think it would be a lot cooler if people could just communicate without having to worry about who's listening.
Nick: I mean, that would be a lot cooler. But we know from the past, and as we've talked about before, you can't trust corporations to do anything correctly.
Brian: My girlfriend isn't as concerned about privacy as I am, and many women that she knows aren't because there's the vantage point that, ‘Hey, finally, somebody is watching all this crap we're dealing with.’
Nick: If you've been saying for a long time, ‘Hey, people treat me like shit online.’ And now Google can go in and be like, ‘Yeah, people have. Here's all the content to back it up.’ That could be a useful tool.
Brian: Bypassing Facebook specifically is cool. Facebook, uncool. Building tools to help people not be intruded upon by Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg, cool.
Nick: You know, I said earlier that I'm not too concerned about my privacy online, but if there's one person that I do not want to see my conversations or the content that I produce, it's Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn't deserve it.
Brian: Although he does deserve to listen to this show and figure out how to be a little bit cooler.
Nick: Mark, if you'd like to come on, we'd welcome any idea that you have, as long as it's not the one that is undermining our democracy.
Brian: We're a platform, and we'll have anybody who has an idea. We don't take responsibility for it.
Nick: You're well aware of that line of logic... Brian, what do you think about such a serious tool? Having such a funny name?
Brian: I think that's cool. It is a whimsical approach to something that otherwise might be construed much more seriously.
Nick: Because it is named party.lol, I'm at least more interested in trying it out. If it was called like DataDefender or ConversationBlocker.url, I just wouldn't be as interested.
Brian: I think somebody planning an insurrection against the state would be more likely to use KeepMyConversationsLockedUp.com than party.lol.
Nick: That's true. Party.lol doesn't seem to market itself to the right-wing, white supremacist, fascist militias that our most pressing national security issue right now. It just seems to me like those guys don't know how to have fun, so they wouldn't use a site called party.lol.
Brian: Although the, uh, Quote Unquote equally bad Antifa activists seem like they do know how to have fun and also have problems with the state
Nick: As someone once said, there are good people on both sides.
Learn more about party.lol and add the extension to your browser here. And, delete that dumb Facebook account already!
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